July 27, 2013

Happy to have had been at Akademy 2013

Plannings for the travel were complicated & two weeks before the event things looked too expensive. But I had my talk in the program and also I just wanted to go. So I decided to try harder and then found an acceptable solution, which included renting a flat from private together with my good work-mate Jos, right across the stadium on the other side of the river.

And I am so happy I went! It was a very good time in Bilbao, I have to join the choir of those that are cheering up the organizers, helpers and sponsors:Thank you/Eskerrik asko!

Bilbao & environment is really a nice spot, additionally the weather was perfect and the local food was so tasty. Then lots of interestings topics in the program and meeting people once again in real world. And everything well organized and cared for. Even the travel was without any missed connections or other issues. So completely happy Akademy time.

Had to deal with a challenge I did not expect: to jump on the daytrip into the water from a harbour wall, from above my height fear trigger level. Nice idea for a first time ever contact with the Atlantic ocean, I will remember that. Seeing how much fun especially Milian was having on his uncounted jumps helped me to conquer my fear 2 times for the final step/jump over the edge into the void, to be accelerated endlessly before splashing into the surprising salty water :)
It surely was interesting for the locals to see that flock of international people invade the harbour walls and then act like murres, throwing themselves into the water again and again from the height.

Another jump in new waters I did with my talk about the Kasten framework I am developing under the hoods of Okteta. So far I only had hinted at the framework in some blog posts here, because it has been still rather in initials states and changing all the time and there are quite some shortcuts in the code to make Okteta working as expected and not exposing the rough internals. Initially, when proposing the talk in spring, I had planned to get the QML parts of Kasten ready in time for the talk, so the value of Kasten might be even more visible already. But well, some life threads with higher priority required my resources more often :) So QML in Kasten is postponed for now. Still I am happy to have shown off some of the ideas behind Kasten and a little the current state of the implementation, because it meant getting more serious with it for me, and some first feedback was also collected. With all the talk about Qt5/KF5 I also decided after the talk to skip further development of Kasten on Qt4/KDELibs4, unless needed for some new features of Okteta, and go straight to Qt5/KF5 as platform, soon also in an own repository outside of Okteta’s.

And because one talk is not enough, I happened to help out in a replacement talk that Jos did just before mine, doing some promotion for the OpenDocument Format. We of course did not let slip by the opportunity to demo the related latest cool thing we have been doing at our company KO GmbH, realtime collaborative editing of ODT documents in the browser with WebODF. That was a really good experience to see lots of people from the audience log in to the editing session and showing their creativity (e.g. in placing ads*), first time outside of my working chair :)
* One really needs spam filters everywhere, sigh… ;)

Kevin Krammer’s talk about Declarative Widgets was another talk to catch my attention for the complete time and after, using QML and still QWidgets is definitely attractive. In a discussion the next day Kevin also recommended me to use QML for my Kasten framework, given that the QML engine happily works with any objects that are QObject. And a declarative definition of Kasten-based programs/modules is what I would like to support one day as well.

Learned the hard way that one has to/should register for any (sub-)events, to make sure also any goodies can be received (and this one would have been really useful to me in the next month for Kasten experiments, too bad). Then, do I really, really need it? Perhaps less is more… At least if it is about people who store my email account details ;)

Saturday after Akademy I learned on a trip to the beach “Barinatxe” as recommended by our flat-owner (BTW, also awesome from the Akademy organizers to have got free metro tickets for everyone, for the complete tracks) that beaches can be too hot for more reasons than what you(?) would think: the sand was simply too hot to go bare-footed on it more than a few meters, possibly due to his rather dark color. And one needed a thicker towel to stay laying there with comfort. Funny to see all the people always running from their place into the water.

Found a small shell on the daytrip, that will remind me a little longer here on my desktop of this really fine Akademy. Well done, everyone!